What are you up to?

[evildre]

My new keyboard came in. Time to get used to the different heights of the keys ... they're medium-height. I angled it up and put the wrist rest in front of it. The way it attaches to the keyboard is a little weird -- it just sits up against it and there's a small magnet involved. Weird.

[Sorce]

The ol' SGS4G is older than dirt, but I am having a hard time putting it down. When I started, it only worked in the technical sense, and a lot of roadblocks have popped up since then, but every time I get something to work, it's like I'm surrounded by a million banana stickers.

It's not going to be my daily driver, but dragging a phone kicking and screaming into the future is fun as hell.

[TheGeekRedneck]

Originally Posted by Sorce

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKUX6thF8Q

I'm down.

Me too!

[TheGeekRedneck]

Originally Posted by Sorce

The ol' SGS4G is older than dirt, but I am having a hard time putting it down. When I started, it only worked in the technical sense, and a lot of roadblocks have popped up since then, but every time I get something to work, it's like I'm surrounded by a million banana stickers.

It's not going to be my daily driver, but dragging a phone kicking and screaming into the future is fun as hell.

I'd like to dig out my old Samsung Galaxy Nexus, or even better... my first Android phone... the Samsung Intercept. FroYo baby!

Unfortunately I can do neither - they both went to the landfill years ago.

Yup. I said the landfill. I'M A REBEL!


Still alive and making progress, both on general home improvement projects and on my bedroom / office / studio setup.

Stuff I've done in the last week:

• Added an electrical outlet and HDMI to the wall above the fireplace where the 65" Vizio is now mounted. The other end of the HDMI was run to what I'm calling the 'Networking and Home Theater Center". Basically it's an area about 8 feet up on a built-in cabinet. Everything we don't need to routinely access is up there - the NAS, the security DVR, the router, the AT&T Gigapower Gateway, and as of yesterday the Dish Network Hopper3 DVR and my trusty old Onkyo TX-NR515 home theater receiver. (That's what's sending everything over that single in-wall / attic HDMI cable)
• Added a flush mount ceiling box (1/2" deep) to the den and ran 14/2 Romex to it. This involved LOADS of time in a 120+ degree attic. It was not fun and I am pretty convinced I broke a rib up there. Then I wired up a new light switch for that fixture box.
• Relocated the fancy ass remote control ceiling fan from the breakfast nook to the den, and then installed a stained glass hanging light in the breakfast nook.
• More paint. I hate painting.
• Moved my TV (and former PC monitor) to an articulating wall mount above my desk and ran a new electrical outlet right up next to the mount. I also relocated the coax for the Dish receiver to the same area behind my TV. The end result is a completely 'floating' install and I fucking love it.
• More stuff I'm totally forgetting

Really I've been working non stop since the beginning of July when we started preparing for the floor replacement. I told my aunt (Traci, I rent from her) that I'm about ready to lose my shit soon. I need downtime.

Tonight... err I guess this morning since it's now getting close to 6AM.... I decided to tackle setting up my PC for real and hiding wires and whatnot. I made pretty good progress and actually got my amp/receiver, sub, and speakers hooked back up to my PC.

This LG curved ultra-wide is damn nice. Visually it really doesn't seem drastically smaller than the 50" Samsung I have been using for the last several years. And the curve makes for some wicked immersion, at least in videos. I haven't had any time to fire up a game yet.... yeah Sorce, I know, I know... It's GONNA happen.

[Sorce]

My response:

Don't worry, you are playing the game... of life.

Alt response:

Don't worry, you already lost the game.

[Sorce]

It should be noted that when I say "kicking and screaming into the future", I do not mean finding a newer version of Android to put on the phone. I mean using Gingerbread and finding apps that are old enough to actually run on the system.

I can flash ICS, JB, or even just the Play Store with no issue, except that largely kills the system. 4.0 was apparently a watershed moment in both hardware and software. Because that's the point Google was all "Fuck you, download what we want." And most phones didn't have an issue because they were all sitting on larger built-in storage and amounts of RAM.

Also I fucked something up and had to nuke and start over. Heck of a way to see if the last two weeks or so had been for naught.

[Sorce]

Fucked up and accidentally put the Play Store on the phone. I had a group of APKs I wanted to install, and somehow that got in there. The good news is that it's very, very removable with no real harm to the phone. Also, while the phone was choking under the forced downloads, I managed to get a handful of non-Google apps installed that don't need the Store or Google Services to run.

It's not the latest version, but now my Old AF Phone has Pandora, Spotify, Dolphin Browser, Instagram, and Twitter installed and ready to go. I don't know if I'll keep all of them (probably just Pandora and maybe Dolphin), but the fact that I could download/install them is pretty neat. A couple other apps didn't have a compatible version, lookin' at you Slacker Radio, Snapchat, and theScore, but I'm just happy I got as many as I did.

It's also especially impressive since the last custom ROM (and minimal install one, too) I had on the phone could only fit YouTube and Pandora on there before it started pitching a fit about a lack of free space. And I still have plenty (relative term) of space left.

[TheGeekRedneck]

Dolphin? There's a browser I haven't heard of in a long ass time!

No KitKat ROM for the phone? I mention Kitkat because that was when Google went on a mission to have Android run much better on minimal hardware than before. So where as ICS and Jelly Bean ran kind of laggy on older hardware KitKat brought back a ton of performance and less bloat for older handsets.

[Sorce]

KitKat has the Play Store, so it's a no-go. The only real reason this has worked as well as it has is that the pre-installed Android Market app cannot connect to Google's servers. Once that connection is there, it's always on. Which means Google will perpetually try and download stuff that it deems worthy to your phone that it supposedly needs to run it's own suite of programs. If you delete said data, and tell your phone to not download it in the future... it turns that service back on and does it anyway.

It fairly quickly chokes the life out of (very) old devices like the SGS4G since they sit on less than a GB of hard drive space and RAM combined. The upside is that Google Play is not the only game in town as far as app stores/servers (not to mention sites that just host APKs) so you're not totally in the dark, especially if you can root your phone.

[evildre]

I've containerized one more thing today: the file server VM. Makes a hell of a lot more sense for a server running a single share to use 92 MB of RAM, than for it to use at least 2 GB.